In his new autobiography, Waging Heavy Peace, Neil Young writes that his own father thought the song “Old Man” was written for him. In reality, the song was inspired by the long-time caretaker of the Northern California ranch that the rock star bought as a 24-year-old. Still, Young never corrected his father’s assertion, “because songs are for whoever receives them.”

I contend that more Canadians have received Young’s songs — which touch upon the psychedelic era (Buffalo Springfield), the singer-songwriter genre (his most popular album, Harvest) and arena-sized garage rock (his albums with Crazy Horse), with forays into rockabilly, electronica and the blues — than anyone else. Although the 66-year-old singer-songwriter has lived in the United States since the mid-1960s, his music is how Canadians would like to see themselves: wryly understated, reverent toward the natural world, and independent to the point of standoffishness.

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Written in 2011, during a rare instance of songwriter’s block for Young, Waging Heavy Peace isn’t the standard rock biography insofar as it evades the linear, three-act structure of a Behind the Music documentary: youthful hit-making, drug-fuelled nosedive and resurgence as rehab-fitted oldies act. Young’s first work of prose — 497 pages long, but generously padded with blank pages and photos — is structured as a series of autobiographical essays that jump in chronology. Young lavishes many of those pages on self-funded passion projects such as LincVolt (an electric car project) and PureTone (an ultra-high-fidelity music system that attempts to end Young’s longstanding beef with the inferior quality of digitized music), as well as digressions on his model train collection, his fondness for plaid shirts, his belief in a “great spirit” and his wife’s dog. Reading those sections might not be terrifically edifying for casual fans, but, in his music, Young has cultivated a following among those who see the emotional candour and the purity of an eccentric vision fulfilled in his headlong pursuit of his many muses. For those fans, Young’s digressions offer a glimpse into his restless worldview, an approach to life that has aggravated his fans, musical collaborators, record executives and staff — often with a sense of humour. With his 2006 screed against George W. Bush, “Let’s Impeach the President,” he writes, “I didn’t waste any time on a melody … It was delivered in a cheap paper bag like something that came with no desire to decorate it.”

Devoted fans will be delighted by the amount of unmediated Neil Young, the son of author Scott Young, that appears on the page. The book is filled with shout-outs to old friends and frequent addresses to the reader: noting his frequent use of the word “great” often in one chapter, he says, “I have looked up many other words I could have used in the thesaurus, but that is not my style. I prefer to be boring and use the same words over and over, because that is more true to who I really am. That may not work for you if you pride yourself on your great vocabulary.”

There’s stuff about music, too. We get a sense of Young’s erratic creative process, when he states that, “Sometimes a smooth process heralds the approach of atrophy or death.” Young says his lyric, “It’s better to burn out than to fade away,” infamously quoted in Kurt Cobain’s suicide note, referred to “the rock and roll star, meaning that if you go while you are burning hottest, then that is how you are remembered,” before noting that “[a]t sixty-five, it seems that I may not be at the peak of my rock and roll powers” and then adding that “there really is more to life than its charged peak.”

And while there is some gossip in this book, for the most part Young strikes a lofty, valedictory tone in Waging Heavy Peace, glossing over that interpersonal friction that has warded off creative atrophy and death. He isn’t out to needle old friends (as Keith Richards did when he mocked Mick Jagger’s male appendage in his own very readable autobiography Life), which can often lead to some toothless characterizations of his close relationships.

For example, Young calls his frequent collaborator Stephen Stills “a genius. Like any genius, he is often misunderstood, and I misunderstood him many times when we were young.” There’s no mention of the time Young abandoned Stills while touring with him in 1976, later sending him a telegram that read: “Funny how things that start spontaneously end spontaneously. Eat a peach, Neil.”

Still, this is a disarming, beguiling autobiography. In one aside, Young catches himself using the phrase “formative year” and taking issue with it: “What the hell is a formative year compared to a normal year? That is a ridiculous phrase. Formative years. I am striking that from my repertoire.” You can see how that phrase might offend the sensibility of an aging rock star who’s still aiming to revolutionize the automobile and music industries while producing new albums. Each and every one of his 60-plus years has been formative for Neil Young, an “old man” who keeps forming to keep from fossilizing.

• Kevin Chong is the author of four books, including the music memoir, Neil Young Nation.

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